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Outlook 2010 Bug Creates Monster Email Files
Julie188 writes with this snippet from Network World "Office 2010 is still in beta and a patch is already out. Microsoft is trying to fix a bug in the email program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space. The Outlook product team has offered a bug fix for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems that fixes the problem going forward, although previous emails will remain super-sized. This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes, such as Gmail or BlackBerry."
Oh my heavens! A bug in a beta? What is the world coming to?
rooooar
A bug in beta? From an MS product? Thanks slashdot!
So what if they're just covered in shiny material and cost 10x more than regular email files? The guy in the blue shirt told me they were worth it.
Buttercup: Westley, what about the E.O.U.S.'s?
Westley: Emails Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist.
[Immediately, an E.O.U.S. attacks him]
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
I'd say this this is a problem for programs that don't limit sizes. TFA doesn't state any numbers, but I wouldn't want my BlackBerry to try and open files with thousands of lines of redundant CSS code.
What's this story doing in "Mobile"?
Besides, a beta bug? Front page news? Come on... :-S
No one I know even use Office 2010 in a production system yet.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
E-mail's going away because broadcast messages are better served over RSS, quick person-to-person notes cam travel over IM, SMS, or Twitter, and business documents can be transferred over secured web sites. Whole lot of new ways of doing things...
Sounds like half a solution to me. When will they fix the problem going backward?
More than just free email limits size. Size limits are one of the variables you can set in Exchange 2003, and I believe the default maximum email size is 5MB. Given that most private organizations do not have unlimited email space, setting a limit on size is just as important as monitoring the size of the Information Store. (Fair warning, I may be wrong about the specific default max email size for exchange 2k3.)
Maybe in Grandma's basement Email is going away but not in the real business environment. In the basement twitter and RSS and IM are all valuable communication tools in the business world they are toys and email is the only really valid tool with a little bit of IM possibly as outlook now has that ability if companies enable it. People like you that make such comments simply make me laugh as it's obvious you have no real world experience where business is concerned. Email isn't going anywhere, it's a barely valid tool thats at least partially traceable, IM, twitter and other social networking has no valid business purpose and most of the protocols have no way to validate either the content or the author and as a result will just be toys in the business world.
Tokyo is so screwed!
most of the protocols have no way to validate either the content or the author
you can validate content and author in emails? you must be new to spam, or have been away from the net since 1992.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Closed internal e-mail systems may be perfectly secure... as it's easy to fire anybody who makes trouble with it. However, once you expose e-mail to the internet, you've got to deal with spam and other troublemakers.
No, this kind of thing is why you have beta testing. It's only February and I think we already have a strong contender for "Non-story of the Year" here.
Read RFC 821 (SMTP)! E-Mail has no validation of the source either...
Your E-Mail Program just has to pretend to be an SMTP server itself
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
No this is the kind of thing a BETA is supposed to catch, i.e. bugs that were not caught by internal testing. The entire purpose of a beta is to find these sort of bugs.
I mean really? A bug in beta software? This is outrageous, haul Microsoft up before congress immediately.
Is /. turning into Fox News now?
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
Sure you can. You use digital signatures. The problem is you need somebody with above room temperature IQ to administer the key signing infrastructure, and those folks are in short supply. That's why it's never caught on.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Because we all know just how much better email is in 64bit.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You mean the fact that Outlook "creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space" is new?
Silly me, thinking 3K of HTML/header overhead to send a one sentence email fell into that description, because Outlook has done that forever.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
And Outlook 2007 is a *shipping product*.
Searching a subfolder inside your inbox still doesn't work (it will find items but you can't open them), It has the must unusual ideas about drag and drop attachments (sometimes it just attaches a GIF icon, but not the document itself), And my favorite, it will randomly exit with an error (an error has occured, would you like to send a report?), when right clicking selected text to change the typeface...
Outlook 2003 was a miracle of speed and stability compared to 2007, so I imagine that, given their reputation to build worse and worse products over time, Outlook 2010 will be a disaster of titanic proportions. With a slew of "features" no one ever wanted or needed.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
>>>E-mail's going away because broadcast messages are better served over RSS, quick person-to-person notes cam travel over IM, SMS, or Twitter, and business documents can be transferred over secured web sites. Whole lot of new ways of doing things...
>>>
I'm an electrical engineer and have to idea what you're talking about.
And if I don't know what you're talking about,
neither does your average secretary or business manager.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Celsius or Fahrenheit?
Can't imagine why this is on here and why any of us are wasting our time replying. Dang! Just lost 30 seconds of my life.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
We don't know when this defect was introduced into the code. It could have been a recently introduced defect or one that has been around for awhile; we have no way of knowing.
Bottom line is this is a BETA release. Sometimes the simplest defect can cause very nasty looking symptoms and look like a giant problem even though it has a very simple solution. And the most harmless looking defect can really be the tip of the iceberg, a huge design defect (or whatever) that is extremely difficult to resolve. It is pretty pointless to speculate about the state of a product just by looking at defects it has at any point on the pre-release stages of the product's lifecycle, because we just don't have enough information to make a meaningful conclusion.
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
I suppose you weren't kind enough to report that?
No?
Well then, screw you, someone might say, as it is beta and you didn'd do your part.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
You mean when they posted just yesterday that Linux Not Quite Ready For New 4K-Sector Drives? Or was it when they wrote Some Early Adopters Stung By Ubuntu's Karmic Koala?
Oh, you must mean the story "Zero-Day Vulnerabilities In Firefox Extensions". No, no, this is it: Bug In Most Linuxes Can Give Untrusted Users Root
You're full of shit.
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the email program Outlook 2010 Beta that creates unusually large e-mail files that take up too much space.
Isn’t that expected behavior for all MS Office programs? ;)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It has to be an Easter Egg. But what is it? I, for one, would be quite happy to discover during the course of examining my work email files that there was a new way do something constructive with my day, perhaps a World of Warcraft ICC rep run. And as far as bugs go, I could always use a few more stacks of Nerubian Chitin.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Not only did Microsoft announce this on their Outlook 2010 blog back on Jan 22, but they announced the patch for it on Feb 11.
And it's beta software. We kinda expect it to make mistakes. Unlike some companies that keep their products in beta for a decade.
I've been using Office 2010 for a few months now and absolutely love it. It's not very different from 2007. Just refined, like Windows 7 is to Vista. It has a few new features in each application that users will enjoy, especially in Sharepoint environments.
One very cool feature in Outlook is the "People Pane" which appears optionally next to the message you're reading. Expand it and it will show you all of your prior appointments, emails, IMs, attachments, and more that are connected to that person. So when Fred sends you an email and says "what did you think about that other email I sent you?" it's a piece of cake to find it.
But oh noes! A beta has a bug! There must be nothing else to bash Microsoft for today.
-David
"This could be a problem for email programs that limit message sizes..." It's not necessarily a program that limits the size of an email message, it's an internet service or email provider that limits the message size to or from it's servers. For example, Gmail (remember, it's Google as a company that sets the limit on the message size, not the Gmail app itself) has a 25MB limit on message size, AT&T and Comcast are still 10MB, I believe, and companies like Earthlink (that are still in the ISP dark ages) are 5MB. Also, I believe Earthstink still only gives people a 100MB inbox, while most other ISPs are 1or 2GB or more.
Cheers! - Steve from MyBrotherSteve.com
Virtually no consumer software is without bugs. You try programming something that large-scale that works flawlessly, especially with the oversight of a team leader, a division manager, etc. In fact, due to all that bureaucracy, large corporations are in some ways more vulnerable to bugs than smaller teams.
You miss my point: this is the type of bug I'd expect to get caught before it reaches beta.
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And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that this is one of them. Please understand; I'm not Microsoft bashing, just wondering why this particular bug didn't get caught earlier, because it looks like it's triggered by a very common type of text.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I'm pretty sure this bug has been there since Outlook 2003.
*waits for 4GB PST file to back up over the network*
.
.
(*places spare change into piggy bank to save up for MS Exchange*)
I probably wouldn't have noticed this as the number of users I see who attempt to email files between 50MB and 4.2GB is amazing! They actually complain that it is taking forever to send their email or that their email has stopped working completely because they are receiving a massive file which clogs their receive queue!
Maybe in Grandma's basement Email is going away but not in the real business environment. In the basement twitter and RSS and IM are all valuable communication tools in the business world they are toys and email is the only really valid tool with a little bit of IM possibly as outlook now has that ability if companies enable it.
Your dad just called. He said that SNDMSG isn't going away and that e-mail is considered a 'toy' in the business environment. And your grandfather is on line two...err...he's on the telegraph...I think he's saying something about that new-fangled phone and a business or something. I was never good at morse code...
There's no place like
Back in the Windows NT days, a coworker emailed a 36MB core dump file to his boss and accidentally sent it to everyone in the company. Email was offline for three days as the admin deleted the offending email from every user account by hand.
[grin=on]... was that a bug? Outlook and big files?
by now, I got used to big bloated files; so I didn't really care about them at all!
[grin=off] (wonderful to control those muscles on command)
am I glad I'm using Thunderbird ... since I'm still searching "The right" alternative.
The Bat from Ritlabs used to be good..
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
To get rid of those older monster e-mails, the Outlook team suggests running Conversation Cleanup, a new feature of Outlook 2010, which moves all the older, redundant messages in the user's e-mail conversations to the Deleted Items folder. Cleanup keeps the most recent message around, Microsoft says, ensuring users have all the content in the conversation while allowing them to delete the redundant messages.
I hope this "feature" has the intelligence to scan all the earlier messages in the thread to make sure that all the people in the conversation are clueless and have blindly quoted the entire conversation in each of their posts.
I wonder how it handles branches in the conversation? Does it keep the final message in each branch?
I think, to be fair, digital signatures could just as easily be incorporated into other means of communications - they're hardly specific to email, so I don't see them as being specifically way of securing or validating email per se...
I've watched specifically Microsoft since 1986, my friend. They've done bugger-all for creating anything proper - they really DON'T care about fixing things, they only truly care about making use of marketing, PR, F.U.D. and the likes to push products into the market. If they truly gave a care about creating a perfect product, they'd have done so - and probably would have used Xenix as the base. Sorry to trod on your Microsoft-apologist feelings.
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire